The release of Devuan 6.1 "Excalibur", a fork of Debian GNU/Linux delivered without the systemd system manager, has been announced. Live builds with the Xfce desktop environment (1.7 GB and 879 MB) and ISO installation images (4.2 GB, 593 MB) for the amd64 architecture are available for download. Packages are being built for the i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, ppc64el, and riscv64 architectures. Images for ARM systems and of virtual machines are offered to be created independently using the arm-sdk and vm-sdk toolkits.
The project supports branches for about 400 Debian packages, which have been modified to eliminate dependencies on systemd, rebranded, or adapted to the specifics of the Devuan infrastructure. Two packages (devuan-baseconf, jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan) are found only in Devuan and are related to repository configuration and build system operation. Otherwise, Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can be used as a base for creating specialized Debian builds without systemd. Devuan-specific packages can be downloaded from the packages.devuan.org repository.
The default desktop is based on Xfce 4.20 and the Slim display manager. Optionally available for installation are KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, and Sway. Instead of systemd, the classic SysVinit initialization system is used, along with optional openrc and runit systems. There is support for operation without D-Bus, allowing for the creation of minimalist desktop configurations based on window managers like blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, fvwm-crystal, and openbox. For network configuration, a version of NetworkManager that is not tied to systemd is offered. Instead of systemd-udev, eudev, a fork of udev from the Gentoo project, is used. For managing user sessions in Xfce and MATE, consolekit is utilized, while elogind, a version of logind not tied to systemd, is used in other desktops.
Changes in Devuan 6.1 mainly involve synchronization with the Debian 13.2 package base, as well as support for the sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC initialization systems. Several issues in the slim login manager and the speech-synthesis package have been fixed. The community has created unofficial builds for Raspberry Pi boards. Additionally, the beginning of testing for a repository with packages for Devuan 7 "Freia", based on the Debian Testing repository, which will form the basis for the upcoming Debian 14 release, is noted.
Source: opennet.ru
